"In part a portrait of the artist as a young woman, this
deceptively modest-seeming, astonishingly inventive novel creates
an extraordinary intimacy, a sensibility so alive it quietly takes
over all your senses, quivering through your nerve endings, opening
your eyes and heart. Youth, from unruly student years to early
motherhood and a loving marriage--and then, in the book's second
half, wilder and something else altogether, the fearless, half-mad
imagination of youth, I might as well call it--has rarely been so
freshly, charmingly, and unforgettably portrayed. Valeria Luiselli
is a masterful, entirely original writer."--Francisco Goldman

In Mexico City, a young mother is writing a novel of her days as
a translator living in New York. In Harlem, a translator is
desperate to publish the works of Gilberto Owen, an obscure Mexican
poet. And in Philadelphia, Gilberto Owen recalls his friendship
with Lorca, and the young woman he saw in the windows of passing
trains. Valeria Luiselli's debut signals the arrival of a major
international writer and an unexpected and necessary voice in
contemporary fiction.
"Luiselli's haunting debut novel, about a young mother living in
Mexico City who writes a novel looking back on her time spent
working as a translator of obscure works at a small independent
press in Harlem, erodes the concrete borders of everyday life with
a beautiful, melancholy contemplation of disappearance. . . .
Luiselli plays with the idea of time and identity with grace and
intuition." --"Publishers Weekly"